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Photorec does a great job when recovering deleted files. But the result is a huge, unsorted, unnamed amount of files. Especially for external hard drives serving as backup of all the personal data, sorting them is an endless job.

This program sPRF helps you sorting your files. First of all, the files are copied to own folders for each file type. Second, jpgs are distinguished by the year, and optionally by month as well when they have been taken and by the event. We thereby define an event as a time span during them photos are taken. It has a delta of 4 days without a photo to another event. If no date from the past can be detected, these jpgs are put into one folder to be sorted manually.

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• Installation
  • From PyPI
  • Manual installation
  • Uninstall
• Usage
  • Parameters
    • Max numbers of files per folder
    • Folder for each month
    • Keep original filenames
    • Adjust event distance
    • Rename jpg-files with <Date>_<Time> from EXIF data if possible
• TODO
• License
• Credits

Requirements

Here's a breakdown of the packages needed and their versions:

• poetry >= 1.8.3 (only for manual installation)
• core-helpers
• exifread >= 3.0.0
• rich >= 13.5.3

Note

The software has been developed and tested using Python 3.12.1. The minimum required version to run the software is Python 3.9. Although the software may work with previous versions, it is not guaranteed.

Installation

From PyPI

photorec_sort can be installed easily as a PyPI package. Just run the following command:

pip3 install photorec_sort

Important

For best practices and to avoid potential conflicts with your global Python environment, it is strongly recommended to install this program within a virtual environment. Avoid using the --user option for global installations. We highly recommend using pipx for a safe and isolated installation experience. Therefore, the appropriate command to install photorec_sort would be:

pipx install photorec_sort

The program can now be ran from a terminal with the photorec_sort command.

Manual installation

If you prefer to install the program manually, follow these steps:

Warning

This will install the version from the latest commit, not the latest release.

1. Download the latest version of photorec_sort from this repository:

   git clone https://github.com/YisusChrist/photorec-sort
   cd photorec_sort

2. Install the package:

   poetry install --only main

3. Run the program:

   poetry run photorec_sort

Uninstall

If you installed it from PyPI, you can use the following command:

pipx uninstall photorec_sort

Usage

Then run the sorter:

photorec_sort <path to files recovered by Photorec> <destination>

This copies the recovered files to their file type folder in the destination directory. The recovered files are not modified. If a file already exists in the destination directory, it is skipped. This means that the program can be interrupted with Ctrl+C and then continued at a later point by running it again.

The first output of the program is the number of files to copy. To count them might take some minutes depending on the amount of recovered files. Afterwards you get some feedback on the processed files.

Parameters

Tip

For more information about the usage of the program, run photorec_sort --help or photorec_sort -h.

Max numbers of files per folder

All directories contain a maximum of 500 files by default. If there are more for a file type, numbered subdirectories are created. If you want another file-limit, e.g. 1000, pass that number as the third parameter when running the program:

photorec_sort <path to files recovered by Photorec> <destination> -n1000

Folder for each month

sPRF usually sorts your photos by year:

destination
|- 2015
  |- 1.jpg
  |- 2.jpg
  |- ...
|- 2016
  |- ...

Sometimes you might want to sort each year by month. This can be done using the -m parameter:

photorec_sort <path to files recovered by Photorec> <destination> -m

Now you get:

destination
|- 2015
  |- 1
    |- 1.jpg
    |- 2.jpg
  |- 2
    |- 3.jpg
    |- 4.jpg
  |- ...
|- 2016
  |- ...

Keep original filenames

Use the -k parameter to keep the original filenames:

photorec_sort <path to files recovered by Photorec> <destination> -k

Adjust event distance

For the case you want to reduce or increase the timespan between events, simply use the parameter -d. The default is 4:

photorec_sort <path to files recovered by Photorec> <destination> -d10

Rename jpg-files with <Date>_<Time> from EXIF data if possible

If the original jpg image files were named by <Date>_<Time> it might be useful to rename the recovered files in the same way. This can be done by adding the parameter -j.

photorec_sort <path to files recovered by Photorec> <destination> -j

If no EXIF data can be retrieved the original filename is kept.

In case there are two or more files with the same EXIF data the filename is extended by an index to avoid overwriting files.

The result will look like:

20210121_134407.jpg
20210122_145205.jpg
20210122_145205(1).jpg
20210122_145205(2).jpg
20210122_145813.jpg
20210122_153155.jpg

TODO

Planing to add the following features:

• Reorganize and beautify the Readme adding sections
• Add a full documentation in Wiki section
• Add a Changelog / Release Notes

License

photorec_sort is released under the Unlicense License.

Credits

This is a forked version from the original project sort-PhotorecRecoveredFiles.